August 29, 2014

They examined how children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) react to humanoid robots that provide “graded cueing” — an occupational therapy technique that shapes behavior by providing increasingly specific cues, or prompts, to help a person learn new or lost skills.

The discovery opens up interesting new possibilities for treating memory impairments caused by conditions such as stroke, early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury, and cardiac arrest — along with the memory problems… read more

August 28, 2014

DARPA has created the Atoms to Product (A2P) program to develop enhanced technologies for assembling atomic-scale components and integrate them into materials and systems from nanoscale up to product scale — in ways that preserve and exploit distinctive nanoscale properties.

The new program also seeks to develop revolutionary miniaturization and assembly methods that would work at scales 100,000 times smaller than current state-of-the-art technology.

August 28, 2014

The research group of Arun K. Sharma*, PhD has developed a system for patients with urinary bladder dysfunction that may protect them against an inflammatory reaction** resulting from tissue regeneration, which can negatively impact tissue growth, development and function.

The researchers treated a highly pro-inflammatory biologic scaffold with anti-inflammatory peptide amphiphiles (AIF-PAs). (Self-assembling peptide amphiphiles, or PAs, are biocompatible and biodegradable nanomaterials used in a wide range of… read more

IBM Watson, other tools to provide automated reasoning and hypothesis generation from the complete medical literature

August 27, 2014

Computational biologists at Baylor College of Medicine and analytics experts at IBM research are developing a powerful new tool called the Knowledge Integration Toolkit (KnIT) that promises to help research scientists deal with the more than 50 million scientific papers available in public databases — with a new one publishing nearly every 30 seconds.

The goal: allow researchers pursuing new scientific studies to mine all available medical… read more

A decade-long effort in genetic engineering is close to re-programming yeast cells to make palliative medicines

August 27, 2014

Stanford bioengineers have hacked the DNA of yeast, reprograming these simple cells to make opioid-based medicines* via a sophisticated extension of the basic brewing process that makes beer.

Led by Associate Professor of Bioengineering Christina Smolke, the Stanford team has already spent a decade genetically engineering yeast cells to reproduce the biochemistry of poppies, with the ultimate goal of producing opium-based medicines, from start to… read more

August 26, 2014

Children and adolescents with autism have a surplus of synapses in the brain, and this excess is due to a slowdown in a normal brain “pruning” process during development, according to a study by neuroscientists at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC).

Because synapses are the points where neurons connect and communicate with each other, the excessive synapses may have profound effects on how the brain functions. The… read more

August 26, 2014

Scientists have for the first time grown a complex, fully functional organ from scratch in a living animal by transplanting cells that were originally created in a laboratory to form a replacement thymus*, a vital organ of the immune system.

The advance could in the future aid the development of “lab-grown” replacement organs.

August 26, 2014

Robo Brain is currently downloading and processing about 1 billion images, 120,000 YouTube videos, and 100 million how-to documents and appliance manuals, all being translated and stored in a robot-friendly format.

The reason: to serve as helpers in our homes, offices and factories, robots will need to understand how the world works and how the humans around them behave.

August 25, 2014

George Mason University neuroscience researcher Todd Gillette got a preview of the forthcoming movie Autómata. It “caught me completely by surprise,” he said on his OnMason blog. “Starring Antonio Banderas, here we have a believable future (2044, 30 years from now) in which desertification is threatening society, and a single company is leading the way in intelligent robotics.”

August 25, 2014

You’ve been prevented from accessing your smart phone, computer, tablet, and TV for five days. Do you (A) totally freak out and go into withdrawal or (B) deal with it and regain some of your lost social skills, like reading emotions?

UCLA scientists found that sixth-graders who went five days without even glancing at a smartphone, television, or other digital screen chose option B. They did substantially… read more

NSF awards $20 million to support cloud-computing applications and experiments.

August 25, 2014

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced two $10 million projects, called “Chameleon” and “CloudLab,” to create cloud-computing testbeds to help the academic research community develop and experiment with novel cloud architectures and applications.

The NSF is especially interested in real-time, safety-critical applications like those used in medical devices, power grids, and transportation systems.

August 24, 2014

Ask HitchBOT, a charismatic robot who just hitchhiked its way across Canada from Halifax, N.S. to Victoria, B.C. — a three-week journey of more than 6,000 km (3728 miles) — accepting 18 rides from total strangers and tweeting its progress to its 35,100 followers.

@HitchBOT used GPS and a 3G cellphone wireless connection feeding to a map with its position. It has… read more